Alumnus Rafiq Kathwari '00 Publishes 'My Mother's Scribe'

Alumnus Rafiq Kathwari '00 recently published his newest collection of poems, My Mother's Scribe, with Yoda Press. 

"Part memoir, part fiction, part documentary," My Mother's Scribe is set in Kashmir during the Partition of India in 1947, when Kathwari's mother, Maryam, began "losing her mind." Many of the poems are from the point of view of Maryam's son, who acts as his mother's scribe while she writes letters to the "Prime Ministers of the World." 

According to Gerald Jones, former staff writer at The New Yorker, "Rafiq Kathwari is a dangerous man. A poet of family history, a poet of geopolitics, he breaks down walls in his writing and leaves glittering shards whose beauties make you weep for what is and what could be. [My Mother's Scribe] is poetry that expects tears and earns them." 

Justine Hardy, founder of Healing Minds Foundation—an organization that supports Kashmiris who are mentally and emotionally scarred by political violence and conflict—said of My Mother's Scribe, "Here is a threading together of loss: the Kashmir that Rafiq Kathwari spins together, held by poetic legacy so as to stop the essence of Kashmir from slipping through, is not a place but a prayer. Each line of My Mother's Scribe draws on poetry's miraculous capacity to reveal what the head finds so hard to hear from the heart." 

Rafiq Kathwari's previous collection of poems, In Another Country, won the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, making Kathwari the first Kashmiri recipient of this prize. He obtained an MA in Political and Social Science from the New School before pursuing his MFA at Columbia. He divides his time between New York City, Dublin, and Kashmir. 

"Mother Writes to President Eisenhower" (excerpt)

By Rafiq Kathwari

6 August 1956

Dear Mr. President,

I’m your shadow under the Kashmir sky.

My 7-and-9-year- old boy and girl

are over there across the Cease Fire Line

and my younger four are with me

over here on this side of Partition.

Children who grow up apart don’t know

how to say goodbye.

Gods of wrath have flung me

into an unloved city where flowers are dusty,

and branches are weeping.